De Niro, Robert

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      Robert De Niro’s Career in Five Artifacts

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      The actor recently donated hundreds of boxes of scripts, props, notes and other objects from his work on “Raging Bull,” “Taxi Driver” and more. We dived in.AUSTIN, Texas — When Robert De Niro heard that Marlon Brando’s personal, annotated “Godfather” script was for sale on eBay, he was not too happy. How could such an important cultural artifact, created by an acting icon, a true artist, be as easy to bid on as an old pinball machine, or a Las Vegas coffee mug?This was around 2006, and De Niro had been looking for a place to donate the extensive collection of props, costumes, scripts, letters and mementos he had accumulated throughout his six-decade career. He did not want his “Taxi Driver” script notes to wind up deteriorating in a stranger’s closet in Des Moines, so he sought out a place where the archivists and staff would care for and preserve each piece, including the red boxing gloves and leopard-print robe he wore as Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull” and the pages of letters he and his “Last Tycoon” director Elia Kazan wrote each other. “I wanted to keep it for my kids and I wanted to keep it all together,” De Niro told me just after he viewed an exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin showcasing part of his archives. He was in town last month for the show, and for a gala celebrating the Ransom Center’s 65th anniversary. Leonard Maltin served as the master of ceremonies, and Meryl Streep hopped over to Texas to honor her longtime friend and colleague with a speech.“I don’t know, if you’re spelunking around in there, if you’re going to be able to find the secret of his power and what he does,” Streep said in her speech. “His strength comes from what he doesn’t say.”Texas might seem like an odd home for De Niro’s two Academy Awards and personal photos, but he wanted an institution that would provide easy access to students, researchers and cinephiles from around the world. As he said in his own speech that night: “I had accumulated an appalling amount of stuff. It was going to be either the Ransom Center or an episode of ‘Hoarders.’”The center houses the papers of the acting teacher Stella Adler, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams and Frida Kahlo, to name a few. In his speech, De Niro said he chose the center because of the company his archive would be in. “I imagine my papers talking to their papers, or trying to anyway, and their papers asking my papers, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’”The “Robert De Niro Papers” show runs through January and features a portion of the 537 boxes, 601 bound volumes and 147 folders of items De Niro donated. Here are a few treasures on display, with insights from De Niro and the curator of film, Steve Wilson.Early Headshot and Résumévia Harry Ransom Centervia Harry Ransom CenterThe black-and-white photo of a very clean-cut-looking young De Niro is accompanied by one of his early acting résumés, back when his film roles had names like Friend of Lead. De Niro said he remembered typing those résumés, and when I asked him if he maybe, possibly exaggerated anything, he said, “I think I may have. Maybe I said I was in a play or had a role in a play, and I’d just done a scene.” Wilson said the résumés helped the archivists date some of the items from early in his career, like his old makeup kit, which holds used brushes, tubes and cosmetic sticks that helped De Niro get into character during his early years as a student, before he went to work onstage and in dinner theater. “The existence of these résumés was really interesting to me,” Wilson said. “It does look like he was probably padding résumés. For example, he might say he was in a touring play, but we know he performed a scene at Stella Adler or something.”Fedora From ‘Mean Streets’via Harry Ransom CenterWarner Bros.The hat, and the role, marked the start of one of cinema’s most enduring and powerful collaborations, between De Niro and the director Martin Scorsese. When the actor wore this brown fedora to read for the role of Johnny Boy, the neighborhood punk, Scorsese knew De Niro was his guy, he told New York magazine a few years later. In Vincent Canby’s 1973 review of the film for The Times, he wrote, “The look, language and performances are so accurate, so unselfconscious, so directly evocative.” De Niro’s performance (opposite Harvey Keitel, above left, and David Proval) and that now iconic hat helped create the visceral realism that still manages to feel in-your-face and raw, almost five decades later. “I wore that hat as a kid,” De Niro told me when I asked where it came from. “I just liked it.” When it came time to audition for Johnny Boy, he said, he felt that it fit the character. “He had been keeping wardrobe items that he would use for auditions, like hats and glasses, for a long time,” Wilson said. “It was kind of an arsenal.”License From ‘Taxi Driver’via Harry Ransom CenterTo prepare for his 1976 role as Travis Bickle, a haunted, lonely Vietnam veteran turned New York cabby, De Niro spent a little over a week actually driving a taxi. This was just after he had won an Academy Award for “The Godfather Part II,” and one passenger recognized him and commented that things must be especially tough for actors if an Oscar winner was trying to earn money driving a cab. The license is another piece of the collection that illuminates his dedication to character and the lengths he goes to fully inhabit another life.The exhibition also includes one of De Niro’s annotated “Taxi Driver” scripts, opened to a page where Bickle stares into the mirror. The action simply reads: “His eyes are glazed with introspection. He sees nothing but himself.” Just below that, in blue ink, De Niro wrote, “Mirror thing here?” That “mirror thing,” of course, became “You talking to me?” It’s an improvised moment that has become a hallmark of his career. College-age kids still yell that line to De Niro sometimes when he’s out in public. As for the license, as soon as Wilson saw it for the first time, he “knew immediately that it was the image of the archive. It speaks to his process and says it all. It’s a great piece.”Military Dog Tags From ‘The Deer Hunter’via Harry Ransom Center“I can’t remember if I wore those through the whole production; it was a long time ago,” De Niro said of the ID his character, Mike, wore in Michael Cimino’s 1978 film about a group of friends from a Pennsylvania steel town whose lives are forever scarred by their experiences in Vietnam. Besides the dog tags, the archive displays De Niro’s prep work, including medical records from actual Vietnam veterans, articles about “returning vet syndrome” (now known as PTSD), and detailed notes he took on the dialect of the specific area of Pennsylvania his character hailed from. (Sample: “these ones” and “those ones” can be used interchangeably.)“I think this is where the archive really starts,” Wilson said. “There is a giant uptick in the amount of research material that we have for any particular film once we get to ‘Deer Hunter’ and beyond. Sometime around 1979 or 1980 is when he really got serious about keeping things.” When the dog tags arrived, Wilson noticed they were covered in plastic, as they would have been in real life to keep the metal from making noise and alerting the enemy. By the time the dog tags reached Austin, the plastic was yellowed and leaching liquid, so the archivists removed the decaying material and had them encased again, to stay true to the object’s original form.‘Raging Bull’ Annotated Scriptvia Harry Ransom CenterLike most of the screenplays in the collection, De Niro’s “Raging Bull” draft, dated “2-1-79” and revised by “M.S. and R.D.N.” (the director and actor), is covered in handwritten notes. The hefty version is enclosed in a brown leather folder. Wilson said several of the scripts “seemed to have a personality of their own,” and that there were notes in the pockets of the folder, including one to De Niro from Vikki LaMotta, the real-life wife of De Niro’s character.The script is displayed in a glass case next to the writer Paul Schrader’s handwritten scene outline, scribbled on a yellow legal pad. Several writers were credited in the film, but De Niro and Scorsese went away for a few days together to work on a final draft before production began. De Niro said they headed to the Caribbean because “it just seemed like a nice place to go. We worked on the script and on getting it to a good place. We worked on the character.”The notes across the script pages are tough to decipher. When De Niro stepped away for a moment, I overheard his young daughter telling Wilson that her father had horrible handwriting, so bad that she didn’t even think he used the same alphabet as everyone else. That hard-to-decipher handwriting will probably not stop film lovers and researchers from traveling to the Ransom Center in their quest to decode De Niro’s career, his technique and the mystery of his process, one script note, costume choice and scribbled-on napkin at a time. More

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      Remembering Ray Liotta in ‘Goodfellas’

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      His performance as Henry Hill includes many touches that weren’t in the script. But the producer didn’t want to cast him originally.There’s a moment early in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster classic “Goodfellas” that always tugs at my heartstrings. Scorsese’s movie is brutal and cleareyed and unsentimental, yes. But Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, the viewer’s docent into the criminal world, injects a note of tenderness that’s all the more effective for coming out of the mouth of a slick sociopath. (The movie is based on the true-crime book “Wiseguy” by Nicholas Pileggi; the real Hill attained some celebrity in the wake of the picture’s release.)It’s during the voice-over when Henry recalls as a boy envying the wiseguys who hung out at the pizza parlor and taxi stand across the street from his home. The guy who runs the pizza joint is Tuddy Cicero, brother of the mob underboss Paulie Cicero, for whom Henry will be working soon. Narrator Henry says the gangster’s full name and pauses. Then, in an exhalation that has low but strong notes of love and nostalgia, he adds, “Tuddy.”Now mind you, Tuddy is eventually revealed to be as ruthless and coldblooded a gangster as they come. It is he who puts the bullet in the back of the head of Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) at the fraudulent ceremony at which Tommy is to become a “made man.” But here is Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill, clearly still besotted with a childhood idol and the life he shared with the man. Liotta, who died this week at 67, fills Scorsese’s movie with dozens of equally revelatory touches.When I was researching “Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas,’” my 2020 book about the film, I asked about that moment in the movie several times. The pause and the repetition of Tuddy’s name was not in the script drafts I saw. It was Liotta’s own touch. No one I spoke with remembered whether Liotta suggested it during the voice-over recordings or just added it himself. In any event, it works. Maybe too well, for people who believe that depiction is endorsement. In a movie that relentlessly examines the lure and transgressive thrill of amorality, Liotta’s depiction of Hill is the hook that draws the viewer in.If you saw Hill on television or listened to any of his appearances on Howard Stern, you were likely to get the impression that Henry Hill was what your grandmother might call a schnook. While he did commit acts of violence both gang-related and domestic, he wasn’t intimidating. Edward McDonald, the prosecutor who got Hill and family into the witness protection program, and who plays himself in “Goodfellas,” told me that Hill was more a mob court jester than any kind of master criminal.But Scorsese’s movie isn’t just about real-life gangsters — it’s also about how we mythologize them. “Movie stars with muscle” is how Hill characterizes his crew. And Liotta was a perfect Henry, able to turn on a dime from dry charm to deadly rage. In one of the movie’s famed tracking shots, when Henry escorts his future wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), into New York’s Copacabana nightclub by way of a side entrance, Liotta concocted all the bits of charming business a guy like Henry would use: tip a doorman here, shout out to a cook there, steer your date by the elbow lightly, act like it’s just what you’re due when the waiter flies out from the wings and sets a personal table at the side of the stage. Liotta got suggestions from Hill himself — and more from audiotapes of Hill speaking with Pileggi. But the research Liotta did into Hill’s world, and the inner work he did, was crucial.The part came at a point when he might have been headed for a career as a character actor. He was unforgettable in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild,” as an ex-boyfriend of Melanie Griffith’s whose possessiveness explodes in still-shocking violence. And in “Field of Dreams” he played a reincarnation of the disgraced ballplayer Shoeless Joe Jackson. Sometimes the crinkle in his eye reminded the viewer of the man’s corruption, but his portrayal was mostly of an awe-struck love of the game he could now play forever in a Midwestern cornfield turned ballpark.When “Goodfellas” was announced, more than one of its eventual cast members told me that it was the movie every New York and Los Angeles actor wanted in on. And Liotta was no exception. Everyone liked him for the part save the producer Irwin Winkler. He did not see the actor’s charm. In his book “A Life in Movies,” Winkler recalls Liotta coming to his table at a Santa Monica restaurant and asking for a word. “In a 10-minute conversation he (with charm and confidence) sold me on why he should play Henry Hill,” the producer wrote. When I interviewed Winkler, he said, rather sheepishly, “You heard the story of me not wanting Ray?” I told Winkler I had and said, “I can’t see anyone else doing it.” Winkler responded “Nor can I.”As it happened, I was not able to interview Liotta himself for my book. Early talks with his publicist were promising. It was possible that I could get some time with him when he was in New York promoting “Marriage Story” at the New York Film Festival; then it wasn’t. We were both represented by the same agency; no dice. He was in a film on which a few close friends of mine were crew members. Can’t go there. And as I worked on the book, I heard several accounts of an intense, serious actor who, upon deciding he wasn’t going to do something, kept to that.He had spoken about “Goodfellas” in other interviews, including an oral history that ran in GQ in 2010. The shoot had its challenges: He suffered the death of his mother halfway through and felt at least slightly shut out by male castmates like Robert De Niro and Pesci. Going through De Niro’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, I came across a thank-you card from Liotta, and inside was a handwritten note: “Bob, Now I can tell you how much of a trip it was to work with you. You’re the best. Hope we can do it again. But I really mean Do it!” Liotta’s eagerness is palpable. The two did work together again, in “Copland.”But “Goodfellas” was irreproducible. Because it did show off his range, and it is a landmark film. Liotta’s signature role is one any actor would hope to be remembered by.Glenn Kenny is a critic and the author of “Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas.’” More

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      Where’d All the Method Acting Go?

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      Elyssa Dudley and Listen and follow Still ProcessingApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicIn the 20th century, method acting was everywhere. Actors went to extreme lengths to inhabit the complicated psyche of a character, sometimes making audiences deeply uncomfortable. Think Robert De Niro in “Raging Bull” or Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now.” But in 2022, in our heyday of superhero blockbusters and bingeable story lines, the Method seems to be fading away.Wesley invites Isaac Butler — critic, historian and author of “The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act” — to dissect the Method. They discuss where it came from, its most legendary practitioners, and whether Hollywood has a place for it today.‘They are absolutely in two different movies’One of the examples of the Method that Wesley and Isaac break down is from “Supergirl” (1984). Helen Slater stars as Supergirl, alongside Faye Dunaway, who plays her archnemesis, Selena.Dunaway’s use of the Method “allows her to be so identifiably different and more intense than everybody else in that movie,” Wesley said. She has a “grand performance of this witch character,” Isaac added. “And she’s just, like, really going for it. And it’s big and embodied and really fun to watch.”In contrast to Dunaway, Slater is “much more unwashed” and has a “just-fell-out-of-the-costume-trailer kind of line delivery,” Isaac explained. It’s like they’re “in two different movies,” he said.Check out their differing performances in the clip below:Hosted by: Wesley Morris and Jenna WorthamProduced by: Elyssa Dudley and Hans BuetowEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Marion LozanoExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy Dorr More